Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 08, 2010 @03:41PM
from the had-to-flush-'em-out-somehow dept.

eDarwin writes "Researchers have discovered two previously unknown species of bottom-dwelling fish in the Gulf of Mexico, living right in the area affected by the BP oil spill. Researchers identified new species of pancake batfishes, a flat fish rarely seen because of the dark depths they favor. They are named for the clumsy way they 'walk' along the sea bottom, like a bat crawling."

I'm inclined to agree; while he is responsible for the pressure that eventually trickled down the management chain resulting in the cost-cutting measures leading to the spill, he bears no personal responsibility. That lies with the management in charge of the well.

Except that is orthogonal to capitalism. You can have capitalism without the limited liability of corporations and with laws that punish executives for their actions. And you can have executives with no personal responsibility without capitalism, though you would probably call them something else.

What essentially makes this a problem with capitalism? What makes it that rather than an endemic phenomena in human society reflective of human nature, particularly the desire to avoid accountability (read "hide from justice when it metes out an unfavorable portion") and create systems of abstractions and hierarchical layers behind which to hide? This sort of behavior as well as the thinking embodied in the statement you quote is found in every nation and people of the world, don't mis-assign blame. It's al

No, it has *nothing* to do with capitalism. There are socialist, communist, and any other economic system around that doesn't hold business owners responsible for what their employees do and there are capitalistic ones that do. Even in full command type economies there *has* to be some type of concentration of wealth or power - you at the least have the govt chairmanships that direct policy for the state run factories (and try and hold them responsible - I expect you will get BP execs held responsible, win the lottery, and discover an immortality potion before you get a govt agency to decide to hold itself responsible for its own actions). If you want economies of scale to kick in - and I assure you that you do - then the question isn't if something like BP will exist it is who has control of it. A little mom & pop isn't going to run an offshore deep water oil rig no matter what and industry of that scale exists in nearly every sector (a small local team isn't going to produce whatever the current generation of Intel chips is when someone reads this - or whatever company is currently on top of the world market).

What this is a failure of is a failure of our government. We have regulations in place that would have (maybe - can't truly see alternate time lines but this type of thing is *not* unknown and we can trace the chain of failures) prevented it from being a true disaster. They were ignored from every level you can point at and in many cases still are 70+ days later (not sure the current count) - nor can you pin it on any political group (more than just our two main ones involved too) or any specific president (Obama failed miserably on initial reaction and on his now long term response - Obama has made Bush with Katrina look highly competent).

The problem is that as we get to where in order to advance you have to have not just multi-billion but *multi-trillion* dollar budgets for some advances then there is just so much money/power floating around that it draws corruption to a point that I can't really come up with a good analogy. Given the corruption we have seen with our own regulators (with drugs and prostitutes) and the ineptitude of all levels of govt to respond to this what would a command market have done better? Indeed, the fact that this is hurting their stock and end user sales has done more to spur them than *anything* the govt has done or will ever do. They aren't going to bite the hand that feeds them and look to how whom they donate too, whom is in power, and whom gets elected correlates to see how buyable most politicians are.

While we can certainly point to fairly socialistic countries that do things Right - say the Dutch - it isn't because they are tending socialistic. Indeed, a stronger govt presence and control would have been *worse* in our case - as bad as BP has done our govt has done worse (and I say that is true for the last few decades too, and that is *all* branches of the govt). I can also point to China and the old Soviets for examples of more socialistic countries that are as bad or worse than us. It is more rot at our core and that rot stems more from our concentration of wealth. That concentration of wealth is not so much from being capitalistic as much as it from necessity. While the Dutch have chosen their niche to be world expert on even there they have a concentration of wealth that will most likely one day rot. For world super powers (while we do not list China as one today it is almost there) you are going to have several. The Dutch aren't going to have globally competitive space exploration, deep sea exploration, energy research, computing research, and pretty much globally competitive (say top five) in hundreds of fields. There are only a few countries with the wealth (and by that I mean raw resources) and they *all* suffer (or in the case of the old soviets used too) from the same thing.

In the end I personally think it is more that human nature is such that we will have trouble progressing past a certain point - or at least it is going to be a l

Lead and instill a culture of safety and accountability in a company with a history of dangerous cost cutting.

Like that makes him an exception among his peers. You could say the same of the vast majority of CEO's out there. Luckily only a small number of these silver spoon fuckwits can cause disasters of this magnitude though.

The public pushes companies to make extreme profits and turn a blind eye to their methods until something goes wrong.

The public ? Most people I talk to don't mind companies turning a healthy profit as long as it isn't an exorbitant one earned on the back of workers or by cutting corners but I've yet to hear people push companies to make ever more profits. When you do hear analysts push for ever increasing profits it's usually attributed to some vague entity like "the market" or "investors" which are code for the wealthy few as far as I'm concerned.

Bullshit!Drilling in shallower water is done all the time, but costs money in loss of tourism and only works if that reservoir is not already tapped. No one cares how politically incorrect something is if it makes money.

I followed the timeline and they already had like 5 different things to try within days of it happening.

That is just plain untrue.

April 22 - The Deepwater Horizon rig, valued at more than $560 million, sinks and a 5-mile-long (8 km) oil slick forms.April 25 - Efforts to activate the well's blowout preventer fail. [It took them THREE DAYS to realize they had completely forgotten to maintain the main component intended to prevent the blowout]May 7 - An attempt to place a containment dome over the spewing well fails when the device is rendered useless by frozen hydrocarbons that clogged it [this was not days later, it was over TWO WEEKS LATER]May 16 - BP inserts a tube into the leaking riser pile of the well and captures some oil and gas.May 26 - A "top kill" maneuver starts, involving pumping heavy fluids and other material into the well shaft to try to stifle the flow. [Already over a month later!]June 2 - BP tries another capping strategy but has difficulty cutting off a leaking riser pipe. [etc]

So "within days" they had done one thing, which is to try to manually activate a device that didn't automatically activate because it "had a dead battery in its control pod, leaks in its hydraulic system, a "useless" test version of a key component and a cutting tool that wasn't strong enough to shear through steel joints in the well pipe and stop the flow of oil.".

April 25 - Efforts to activate the well's blowout preventer fail. [It took them THREE DAYS to realize they had completely forgotten to maintain the main component intended to prevent the blowout]

Following the story the BOP had been previously modified, and the drawings were incorrect on top of the lack of maintenance. The crew attempting to operate the BOP were a different crew than those who ran the rig, from a different company as those who modified the BOP, and I guarantee you didn't know the history of maintenance on the device.

Spending three days trying to figure out something may seem like incompetence to you, but quite frankly you are not the one there. I work as a maintenance engineer wi

I don't believe I criticized anyone in particular, but BP and the overall mismanagement and incompetence of the situation.

Large corporations have many employees, of course. Not all of them made mistakes or share any blame in a fiasco like this. Sometimes you can't even blame the corporation or its management, since the mistake was the fault of individuals acting alone.

But who's fault is it that the crew trying to repair the BOP did not exchange proper information with those knowlegable about its installat

5 attempts, no matter how "massive", that fail miserably is in no way impressive to me. No points for effort here, this isn't Kindergarten.

And becomes even less impressive when the ridiculous estimates of 2000-5000 barrels per day leaking were later updated to 60,000-100,000 bpd (and those were really only changed when the majority of non-partisan scientists examining the data pointed out how ridiculous they were... so believe the new "official" estimate with a grain of salt...)

Of course drilling in shallower water is safer. The problem is we've already exhausted a large number of those reserves, forcing deep water drilling.

The reason they had 5 different things to try so quickly is because they were all tried way back during the Ixtoc spill. The ideas weren't new. The problems arise when you consider they're now under a mile of water instead of a few hundred feet.

Its a fairly safe assumption that BP (and other companies) have spent nothing on containment research given the rehash

Are you saying then spent none? Becuase I followed the timeline and they already had like 5 different things to try within days of it happening. The problem is they should not have been forced to drill so deeply in the first place. Drilling in shallower water is MUCH safer although more politically incorrect.

Are you saying then spent none? Becuase I followed the timeline and they already had like 5 different things to try within days of it happening. The problem is they should not have been forced to drill so deeply in the first place. Drilling in shallower water is MUCH safer although more politically incorrect.

The same measures [youtube.com] they took in 1979 when an oil rig exploded in the gulf. Let's face it 30 years of technological progress and they have done nothing to stem the negative effects of their actions.

No, that is not true Capitalism, that is greed and bungled regulation. Capitalism is not greed, and greed is not capitalism. I am AC above you, and I fully agree in terms of government culpability. But if you want to know where the blame against Halliburton is, you must have missed the kangaroo court, Stalinist commission hearings at the outset of the whole mess, where it was like watching the Three Stooges (Oceanic, BP, and Halliburton) in front of what amounts to a show trial. Probably because so much

They didn't. They called him a name which while perhaps harsh, isn't defamatory. You're being unfair comparing the two.

What he did or didn't do may be a matter of perspective considering public opinion could matter a lot in this case.

You could sit in the crowd which holds that corporate executives should not be liable for anything, that there's nothing wrong with acting solely in the interest of shareholders or golden parachutes. That sounds like you.

It's easier to make these things about villians and heros than it is to delve into the sticky and complicated issues as they exist in the real world. Check out this article [independent.co.uk] for some interesting facts about the rig,

There were 126 people working on the Deepwater Horizon rig, yet no more than eight of them were BP employees. Some 79 worked for Transocean, the firm that owned and operated the rig. A further 41 worked for contractors such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp, a BP partner on the well. BP had 65 per

Fuck these fish. Blue Whales, man. Blue fukin Whales. Maybe there were as many as a hundred left. Ok, sucks we hardly knew these fish, but a billion of them isn't worth the life of one Blue Whale. Maybe Blues were done for anyway, but if they no longer have a spawning ground, it still sucks their extinction was hastened just at the heartbreaking end.

Gosh, perhaps the dozens of robots with bright lights and cameras scouring the seabed looking for a broken oil pipe can also spot fish? This is no coincidence. There's hundreds of unique species per square mile of ocean.

Sure, they live on the ocean floor and oil floats, but what do you reckon the chances are that there is a significant amount of water-soluble toxins leaching from that leak? Pretty good chance would be my guess. Oh, and what do these batfish feed on? That's right - the remains of critters poisoned by the oilslick above them.

Well technically a billion is a thousand million. So you would still have millions of liters even if you had billions of gallons. A great way to fudge stats, well there were only tens of safety violations. Well actually it was 300 but that is 30 ten incidents. If you really want to nitpick.

"The well has pumped millions of gallons (liters) of oil into the Gulf"

uh... one of those things is not like the other... I question the validity of any site that thinks gallons and liters are interchangable

You would prefer, then, that the article said "The well has pumped millions of gallons (3,785,411.78's of liters) of oil into the Gulf"? Perhaps a review of the concept of False Precision [wikipedia.org] is in order. "A guard at a museum says a dinosaur skeleton is 70 million and six years old. He reasons that it was 70 million years old when he started working there six years ago."

I think we'd just prefer if stupid journalists didn't think that just because there are people outside America they don't realise that a gallon is a unit of measure for a liquid. I mean Americans make it their life long mission to shout at the top of their voices about how great their imperial system is so why even bother telling people there's such a thing as a litre at all.

That and if there are more than 2.6million gallons then the correct explaination would have been "The well has pumped millions of

. I question the validity of any site that thinks gallons and liters are interchangable

Well, liters and gallons are interchangable [google.ca]. I think you mean they aren't directly comparable because one is almost 4x the other. But it's not an order of magnitude (x10) difference, so I think they can be partially forgiven.

For their partial punishment, they will have to pay the $/gallon price for their liters of gasoline.:-)

To help clarify some of the issues with that statement others have pointed out:

You need to keep in mind the idea of digits of precision. Were I to say "My swimming pool contains one thousand gallons of water" I have given you one digit of precision - you can legitimately say my pool contains four thousand liters of water, because you are still in one digit of precision. You CANNOT legitimately say my pool contains 3785 liters - you just pulled 3 more digits of precision out of the air.

I question the validity of any site that thinks gallons and liters are interchangable

I'm about to nitpick, but....

Both of these statements are true: "The well has pumped millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf". "The well has pumped millions of liters of oil into the Gulf".

They are comparable if we're talking order of magnitude. I know 3.79 != 1, but when we're talking about "millions of" in a vague sense where nobody really knows what's going on, the real difference is between 10^6, 10^7, or 10^8. M*10^

Spokesman for BP assures everyone that the fact that the fish has three heads, 5 legs and squirts a strangely mutagenic substance at it's prey has nothing to do with the oil or the disbursants being injected into the water near the site.

Now just watch, on the BP spin, er, news site, there will be an article saying how great this oil spill is because they discovered two new species of fish. Had then not put all those cameras and submersibles there, we'd have missed out on this new species that will likewise also be wiped out...

You know what? That fact has absolutely no importance and never has. Let's see why.

First, there are two types of news: things that are interesting and things that are important. Things that are important threaten my life or my lifestyle, or those around me. I need to react, and react quickly. This story isn't in that category, and most of what's posted on Slashdot aren't. I don't come here for urgent breaking-news issues, and I shouldn't. On the other hand, things that are interesting generally remain interesting for more than a few moments. The discovery of a new (and interesting) species of fish is an interesting bit of trivia that won't be any less interesting if I read about it today, tomorrow, or a month from now. It's timeless news.

Secondly, it's very hard for the administrators to know how many readers have heard about a particular story yet. They filter through submissions and make decisions based on how interesting a story is. Thing is... I hadn't heard about this anywhere else in the last two to three weeks. If Slashdot hadn't accepted this submission and posted it, I wouldn't have heard about it. Which says that at least in this case - in my case - this acceptance worked exactly as desired. If you already heard about this, feel free to ignore the story.

Third and finally, you imply that because this news isn't 0-day it's not news. What's the threshold? 0-day? 0-minute? Who are you to decide when information is no longer "fresh" enough to merit further dissemination. I'll agree that posting a story announcing the exciting new 80486 processor would be inappropriate but you're quibbling about a few weeks in a story about a new-to-us species of fish.

You should have tried to make a fished p0st instead of complaining about this.

As an entire ecosystem dies above them, the residues, acids, and by-products of decomposition will settle to the bottom. Plus they probably wont miss all that pesky oxygen that can no longer dissolve into the water.

Animals can become susceptible to disease from changes in any number of factors. Temperature, pH, etc.

Plus, do you think the material coming out of the ground is in any way uniform in composition or will remain together? Or is different stuff, metals, chemicals, acids, poisons and whatever

On the other hand, the overfishing has stopped. Many species, such as sea turtles were doomed anyway, not because we eat them as food, but because they are killed in the fishing proces. This is not to mention the number of species that die because their land now has a hotel on it.

If BP would not have caved and paid off the fishing and tourist industry, then many problems would go away. Again, if there were fewer hotels, and few more careful fishing crews, turtles might survive. As it is, the oil is j